A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
A deep examination of why respect is in short supply in politics today and why it matters.
Respect is in trouble in the United States. Many Americans believe respecting others is a necessary virtue, yet many struggle to respect opposing partisans. Surprisingly, it is liberal citizens, who hold respect as central to their view of democratic equality, who often have difficulty granting respect to others. Drawing on evidence from national surveys, focus groups, survey experiments, and the views of political theorists, Jeff Spinner-Halev and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse explain why this is and why respect is vital to—and yet so lacking in—contemporary US politics.
Respect and Loathing in American Democracy argues that liberals and conservatives are less divided than many believe, but alienate one another because they moralize different issues. Liberals moralize social justice, conservatives champion national solidarity, and this worldview divide keeps them at odds.
Respect is both far-reaching and vital, yet it is much harder to grant than many recognize, partly because of the unseen tension between respect, social justice, and national solidarity. Respect and Loathing in American Democracy proposes a path forward that, while challenging, is far from impossible for citizens to traverse.
Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later.
Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.
Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls home, but now only a few cellar holes and tumbled stone walls remain among the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on these Vermont hills. Reading the Mountains of Homeis a journey into these verdant reaches where in the last century humans tried their hand and where bear and moose now find shelter. As John Elder is our guide, so Robert Frost is Elder's companion, his great poem "Directive" seeing us through a landscape in which nature and literature, loss and recovery, are inextricably joined.
Over the course of a year, Elder takes us on his hikes through the forested uplands between South Mountain and North Mountain, reflecting on the forces of nature, from the descent of the glaciers to the rush of the New Haven River, that shaped a plateau for his village of Bristol; and on the human will that denuded and farmed and abandoned the mountains so many years ago. His forays wind through the flinty relics of nineteenth-century homesteads and Abenaki settlements, leading to meditations on both human failure and the possibility for deeper communion with the land and others.
An exploration of the body and soul of a place, an interpretive map of its natural and literary life, Reading the Mountains of Home strikes a moving balance between the pressures of civilization and the attraction of wilderness. It is a beautiful work of nature writing in which human nature finds its place, where the reader is invited to follow the last line of Frost's "Directive," to "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."
More than a century and a half ago, John Adams urged scholars investigate the communications of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, the most radical and important of the revolutionary committees of correspondence. Such a study, Adams suggested, would reveal the underlying impetus of the revolutionary movement. Now, for the first time, Richard D. Brown has made an exhaustive and systematic analysis of the committee that set a pattern for America and for the world by keeping alive the revolutionary spirit at a time when the issues were cloudy and public interest was dormant.
The Boston committee, organized to arouse the people of Massachusetts and to inform them of their rights, initiated the use of local committees of correspondence and went on to become a major revolutionary institution which helped bring about fundamental changes in Massachusetts politics. Mr. Brown's book focuses on the years 1772 to 1774, when the inhabitants of Massachusetts moved from quiet accommodation with the British imperial system to massive rebellion against it. His investigations of the records of the Boston committee and of voluminous town records never before studied have resulted in a revision of previous interpretations regarding the interaction between leaders in Boston and the people in the towns.
The author's findings indicate that the Boston committee did not control Massachusetts political action, manipulating the political behavior of the towns, as earlier theorists have suggested. Though Boston was a leader, the towns generally acted independently, and government by consent developed effectively on the local level. The letters which passed between the capital and the countryside reveal an expanding political consciousness and an ever-increasing political sophistication at the grass-roots level. They articulate an essentially radical view of politics based on popular sovereignty.
As an account of the process of political integration among a colonial people engaged in an independence movement, this book will appeal not only to historians but also to political scientists concerned with the emerging nations of the twentieth century.
With flashes of humor and close attention to detail, Ashley describes a broad range of activities and experiences in the small village of Deerfield and the surrounding towns of the Connecticut River valley. Articulate as well as observant, this former schoolteacher conveys a sense of immediacy that brings even the most mundane daily events to life. He discusses medical theory and practice, revolutionary politics, farming, his family, his circle of friends, and amusements ranging from singing and dancing to sleigh riding and bouts of drunkenness. He also writes about his love life, including a dalliance with the older sister of his fiancee, Polly Williams, while the latter is away visiting relatives in the Berkshires.
For Ashley, personal relationships and politics were the prominent issues of 1773 and 1774, as events in Massachusetts drew the province toward rebellion. He discusses the gathering of angry mobs in response to the so-called Intolerable Acts, the stoppage of the courts in Hampshire County, the anarchy that ensued, and the persecution of loyalists, with or without the sanction of law. When the revolution breaks out in April 1775, he describes the departure of companies of minutemen as they set out for Boston to challenge the British Army.
Six months later, in November 1775, the journal abruptly ends. By then, however, Elihu Ashley had already bequeathed to posterity an extraordinary firsthand account of life in rural New England in the years immediately preceding the War of Independence.
An exploration of this fascinating community as a window on globalization.
In the American popular imagination, Chinatown is a mysterious and dangerous place, clannish and dilapidated, filled with sweatshops, vice, and organized crime. In this well-written and engaging volume, Jan Lin presents a real-world picture of New York City’s Chinatown, countering this “orientalist” view by looking at the human dimensions and the larger forces of globalization that make this vital neighborhood both unique and broadly instructive.
Using interviews with residents, firsthand observation, archival research, and U.S. census data, Lin delivers an informed, reliable picture of Chinatown today. Lin claims that to understand contemporary ethnic neighborhoods like this one we must dispense with notions of monolithic “community.” When he looks at Chinatown, Lin sees a neighborhood that is being rebuilt, both literally and economically. Rather than a clannish and unified peer group, he sees substantial class inequality and internal social conflict. There is also social change, most visibly manifested in dramatic episodes of collective action by sweatshop workers and community activists and in the growing influence of Chinatown’s denizens in electoral politics. Popular portrayals of Chinatown also reflect a new global reality: as American cities change with the international economy, traditional assumptions about immigrant incorporation into U.S. society alter as well. Lin describes the public disquiet and official response regarding immigration, sweatshops, and the influx of Asian capital. He outlines the ways that local, state, and federal governments have directed and gained from globalization in Chinatown through banking deregulation and urban redevelopment policy. Finally, Lin puts forth Chinatown as a central enclave in the “world city” of New York, arguing that globalization brings similar structural processes of urban change to diverse locations. In the end, Lin moves beyond the myth of Chinatown, clarifying the meaning of globalization and its myriad effects within the local context.
In August of 1991, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights was engulfed in violence following the deaths of Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum—a West Indian boy struck by a car in the motorcade of a Hasidic spiritual leader and an orthodox Jew stabbed by a Black teenager. The ensuing unrest thrust the tensions between the Lubavitch Hasidic community and their Afro-Caribbean and African American neighbors into the media spotlight, spurring local and national debates on diversity and multiculturalism. Crown Heights became a symbol of racial and religious division. Yet few have paused to examine the nature of Black-Jewish difference in Crown Heights, or to question the flawed assumptions about race and religion that shape the politics—and perceptions—of conflict in the community.
In Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights, Henry Goldschmidt explores the everyday realities of difference in Crown Heights. Drawing on two years of fieldwork and interviews, he argues that identity formation is particularly complex in Crown Heights because the neighborhood’s communities envision the conflict in remarkably diverse ways. Lubavitch Hasidic Jews tend to describe it as a religious difference between Jews and Gentiles, while their Afro-Caribbean and African American neighbors usually define it as a racial difference between Blacks and Whites. These tangled definitions are further complicated by government agencies who address the issue as a matter of culture, and by the Lubavitch Hasidic belief—a belief shared with a surprising number of their neighbors—that they are a “chosen people” whose identity transcends the constraints of the social world.
The efforts of the Lubavitch Hasidic community to live as a divinely chosen people in a diverse Brooklyn neighborhood where collective identities are generally defined in terms of race illuminate the limits of American multiculturalism—a concept that claims to celebrate diversity, yet only accommodates variations of certain kinds. Taking the history of conflict in Crown Heights as an invitation to reimagine our shared social world, Goldschmidt interrogates the boundaries of race and religion and works to create space in American society for radical forms of cultural difference.
Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." On the other hand, sincerity, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity.
Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world—including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego Anthroman takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.
Long regarded as folklife classics, Henry Charlton Beck's books are vivid recreations of the back roads, small towns, and legends that give New Jersey its special character. Father Henry Charlton Beck, who lived in New Jersey nearly all his life, was the author of numerous books on New Jersey folklife, state editor of the Camden Courier-Post, and writer for the Newark Star-Ledger. He is considered New Jersey's first folklorist and his painstaking work has left us with a rich collection of tales.
Adrian Leiby offers an exciting narrative of the people of Dutch New Jersey and New York during this conflict. Historians will find colorful details about the Revolutionary War, and genealogists will find much previously unpublished material on hundreds of men and women of Dutch New Jersey and New York in the 1700s.
Philadelphia is known as the home of vibrant colonial history: the Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House, and Independence Hall. But the City of Brotherly Love is also home to—and less well known for—its quirky history. The country’s first quarantine station was located here. One of Philly’s clocks has a face larger than Big Ben’s in London. And a unique skill of Black abolitionist James Forten saved him from a life of West Indian servitude (and “Forten” was not even his real name).
In Real Philly History, Real Fast, Jim Murphy provides an original tour of the city. He highlights artistic gems including the Dream Garden Tiffany mosaic and Isaiah Zagar’s glittering Magic Gardens. He profiles intriguing historical figures from military leader Commodore Barry to civil rights heroes like Lucretia Mott. Murphy also explores neighborhoods from Chinatown to the Italian Market and the unique architectural details of Carpenters’ Hall and the PSFS building.
Each chapter provides a pithy story about a historical person or site, along with bullet points featuring interesting oddities, and nearby attractions along with fun facts such as: Why there are so many churches? What is the Philadelphia Eagles’ connection to the U.S. Custom House? Which famous artist may have been Philadelphia’s first nude model? And where was the Liberty Bell secretly damaged? (We didn’t do it!)
This is Philly history in bites that are as digestible as a soft pretzel with mustard.
What happens when people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds come together to live and work in the same neighborhood? Unlike other examinations of this question that focus on one group, this book looks at the interaction of both old and new immigrant populations in three Philadelphia neighborhoods.
In this ethnographic study, which is a result of the Ford Foundation-funded Changing Relations: Newcomers and Established Residents in Philadelphia Project, the authors consider five primary groups—whites, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, and Eastern Europeans—in Olney, Kensington, and Port Richmond. Focusing on the interaction of racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in schools, organized community celebrations and social events, the workplace, shopping areas, and neighborhood politics, the authors show that the contradictions of individual beliefs, actions, and strategies of power are not easily resolved.
By examining the local, citywide, and national economy and government, previous human relations efforts, changing immigration patterns, community-level power structures, real estate turnover, and gentrification, the authors evaluate current strategies to create harmony in communities with an ever-changing mix of established residents and newly arrived immigrants. Through their findings, Judith Goode and Jo Anne Schneider develop better alternatives that will encourage understanding and cooperation among different racial and ethnic groups sharing their lives and neighborhoods.
In the late nineteenth century, life became more stable and orderly for most American city dwellers, but not for blacks. Roger Lane offers a historical explanation for the rising levels of black urban crime and family instability during this paradoxical era. Philadelphia serves as test case because of the richness of the data: Du Bois’s classic study, The Philadelphia Negro, newspapers, records of the criminal justice system and other local agencies, and the federal census. The author presents numerical details, along with many examples of the human stories—social and political—behind the statistics.
Lane reveals how social and economic discrimination created a black criminal subculture. This subculture, overlooked by those histories depending on often inaccurate census materials, eroded family patterns, encouraged violence, discouraged efforts at middle-class respectability, and intensified employment problems by adding white fear to the white prejudice that had helped to create it.
Modern crime rates and patterns are shown to be products of a historical culture that can be traced from its formative years to the 1980s. Lane not only charts Philadelphia’s story but also makes suggestions regarding national and international patterns.
Race and Renaissance presents the first history of African American life in Pittsburgh after World War II. It examines the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the Million Man and Million Woman marches, among other topics.
In recreating this period, Trotter and Day draw not only from newspaper articles and other primary and secondary sources, but also from oral histories. These include interviews with African Americans who lived in Pittsburgh during the postwar era, uncovering firsthand accounts of what life was truly like during this transformative epoch in urban history.
In these ways, Race and Renaissance illuminateshow African Americans arrived at their present moment in history. It also links movements for change to larger global issues: civil rights with the Vietnam War; affirmative action with the movement against South African apartheid. As such, the study draws on both sociology and urban studies to deepen our understanding of the lives of urban blacks.
An illustrated glovebox essential, Road Sides explores the fundamentals of a well-fed road trip through the American South, from A to Z. There are detours and destinations, accompanied by detailed histories and more than one hundred original illustrations that document how we get where we’re going and what to eat and do along the way.
Learn the backstory of food-shaped buildings, including the folks behind Hills of Snow, a giant snow cone stand in Smithfield, North Carolina, that resembles the icy treats it sells. Find out how kudzu was used to support a burgeoning highway system, and get to know Edith Edwards—the self-proclaimed Kudzu Queen—who turns the obnoxious vine into delicious teas and jellies. Discover the roots of kitschy roadside attractions, and have lunch with the state-employed mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida.
Road Sides is for everyone—the driver in search of supper or superlatives (the biggest, best, and even worst), the person who cannot resist a local plaque or snack and pulls over for every historical marker and road stand, and the kid who just wants to gawk at a peach-shaped water tower.
This collection of essays examines the contributions of some of the most notable interpreters of southern history and culture, furthering our understanding of the best historical work produced on the region.
Historian Glenn Feldman gathers together a group of essays that examine the efforts of important scholars to discuss and define the South's distinctiveness. The volume includes 18 chapters on such notable historians as John Hope Franklin, Anne Firor Scott, Frank L. Owsley, W. J. Cash, and C. Vann Woodward, written by 19 different researchers, both senior historians and emerging scholars, including Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, John Shelton Reed, Bruce Clayton, and Ted Ownby. The essays examine the major work or works of each scholar under consideration as well as that scholar's overall contribution to the study of southern history.
Reading Southern History will enlighten readers on the more compelling themes currently and traditionally explored by southern historians. It will appeal greatly to professors and students as a valuable multidisciplinary introduction to the study of southern history, since several of the essays are on scholars who are working outside the discipline of history proper, in the fields of political science, sociology, journalism, and economics. Feldman's collection, therefore, sheds light on a broad spectrum of themes important in southern history, including the plight of poor whites, race, debates over race and class, the "reconstruction syndrome," continuity versus discontinuity in relation to blacks and whites, and regional culture and distinctiveness.
Reading Southern History will be valuable to students and scholars of women's studies, African American history, working-class history, and ethnic studies, as well as traditional southern history. Most important, the publication makes a significant contribution to the development and ongoing study of the historiography of the South.
Illuminating crucial connections between understandings of race, gender, and place on the one hand and narrative and images on the other, McPherson reads a number of representations of the South produced from the 1930s to the present. These are drawn from fiction, film, television, southern studies scholarship, popular journalism, music, tourist sites, the internet, and autobiography. She examines modes of affect or ways of "feeling southern" to reveal how these feelings, along with the narratives and images she discusses, sanction particular racial logics. A wide-ranging cultural studies critique, Reconstructing Dixie calls for vibrant new ways of thinking about the South and for a revamped and reinvigorated southern studies.
Reconstructing Dixie will appeal to scholars in American, southern, and cultural studies, and to those in African American, media, and women’s studies.
Riding on Comets is the true story of an only child growing up in a working-class family during the 1950s and ‘60s.
As the family storyteller, Cat Pleska whispers and shouts about her life growing up around savvy, strong women and hard-working, hard-drinking men. Unlike many family stories set within Appalachia, this story provides an uncommon glimpse into this region: not coal, but an aluminum plant; not hollers, but small-town America; not hillbillies, but a hard-working family with traditional values.
From the dinner table, to the back porch, to the sprawling countryside, Cat Pleska reveals the sometimes tender, sometimes frightening education of a child who listens at the knees of these giants. She mimics and learns every nuance, every rhythm—how they laugh, smoke, cuss, fight, love, and tell stories—as she unwittingly prepares to carry their tales forward, their words and actions forever etched in her mind. And finally, she discovers a life story of her own.
This biography recounts a century of accomplishments, from Hechler’s introduction of innovative teaching methods at major universities, to his work as a speechwriter and researcher for President Harry Truman, and finally to his time representing West Virginia in the US House of Representatives and as the secretary of state.
In West Virginia, where he resisted mainstream political ideology, Hechler was the principal architect behind the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 and constantly battled big coal, strip-mining, and fellow politicians alike. He and his signature red jeep remain a fixture in West Virginia. Since 2004, Hechler has campaigned against mountaintop removal mining. He was arrested for trespassing during a protest in 2009 at the age of 94.
In 1921 Blair Mountain in southern West Virginia was the site of the country’s bloodiest armed insurrection since the Civil War, a battle pitting miners led by Frank Keeney against agents of the coal barons intent on quashing organized labor. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. Ninety years later, the site became embroiled in a second struggle, as activists came together to fight the coal industry, state government, and the military- industrial complex in a successful effort to save the battlefield—sometimes dubbed “labor’s Gettysburg”—from destruction by mountaintop removal mining.
The Road to Blair Mountain is the moving and sometimes harrowing story of Charles Keeney’s fight to save this irreplaceable landscape. Beginning in 2011, Keeney—a historian and great-grandson of Frank Keeney—led a nine-year legal battle to secure the site’s placement on the National Register of Historic Places. His book tells a David-and-Goliath tale worthy of its own place in West Virginia history. A success story for historic preservation and environmentalism, it serves as an example of how rural, grassroots organizations can defeat the fossil fuel industry.
Recent excavation of the Tallahassee area provided anthropological and archaeological evidence showing that the Red Hills of Florida were sought out by agricultural Indians long before European contact
The Red Hills section of northern Florida is composed of Leon County, where Tallahassee is located , and its neighboring counties of Gadsden and Jackson to the west and Jefferson and Madison to the east. The land is distinctive band of rolling red clay hills that extends for 150 miles along the border of Alabama and Georgia. This well-written narrative chronicles the history of the region from the time of first European contact in 1528 through the end of the Civil War, and provides a comprehensive study of this vital section of northern Florida.
Recent excavation of the Tallahassee area provided anthropological and archaeological evidence showing that the Red Hills of Florida were sought out by agricultural Indians long before European contact. DeSoto fed his army of more that 700 during the winter of 1539-40 from corn gathered within a few miles of the principal town of the Apalachee. The Spaniards who settled in the Apalachee area during the mission era depended on the corn for survival and used the Indians of the 14 Apalachee mission in a war of empire building with the English of South Carolina. Raids by these enemies wiped out the Indians of the Apalachee area and its mission in 1704.
Provides a fascinating glimpse into the early history of the Mississippi-Alabama Territory and antebellum Alabama
The two sections of the Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines form one of the most important primary sources on the early history of Alabama and Mississippi. The Reminiscences cover the years 1805 to 1843, during which time Gaines served as assistant factor and then factor of the Choctaw trading house (1805-18), cashier of Tombeckbee Bank in St. Stephens (1818-22), a merchant in Demopolis (1822-32), and finally a banker and merchant in Mobile (1832-43). In addition, Gaines played a key role in Indian-white relations during the Creek War of 1813-14, served a two-year term in the Alabama Senate (1825-27), led a Choctaw exploring party to the new Choctaw lands in the West following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830-31), and served as the superintendent for Choctaw removal (1831-32).
Gaines dictated his Reminiscences in 1871 at the age of eighty-seven. Part of the Reminiscences, referred to as the "first series," was originally published in five issues of the Mobile Register in June-July 1872 as "Notes on the Early Days of South Alabama." Nearly a century later, the first series and the previously unpublished second series, "Reminiscences of Early Times in Mississippi Territory," were published in a 1964 issue of the Alabama Historical Quarterly as "Gaines' Reminiscences."
In this first book-length edition of the Reminiscences, James Pate has provided an extensive biographical introduction, notes, illustrations, maps, and appendixes to aid the general reader and the scholar. The appendixes include additional unpublished primary materials-including interviews conducted by Albert James Pickett in 1847 and 1848 that provide further information about this important early pioneer and statesman.
A remarkable chronicle of southern mountain life in the early 20th century
The Road to Wildcat recounts the travels in North Alabama in the mid-1920s of Eleanor Risley (suffering from diabetes), her asthmatic husband, Pierre, their dog, John, and a Chinese wheelbarrow named Sisyphus that held their travel goods. Advised to make the walking tour for improvement of their health, the group left Fairhope in south Alabama and walked hundreds of miles in the southern Appalachians for months, sleeping out under the stars at night, or in a canvas tent or an abandoned building, cooking their fresh-caught foods over campfires, and accepting the generosity and advice of the mountain people they met, some of them moonshiners and outlaws.
During their sojourn across the rural wilderness, they enjoyed fiddlin’ dances in rickety halls, joined Sacred Harp singers, learned about the grapevine telegraph, saw the dreadful effects of inbreeding, and attended “Snake Night” at Posey Holler (a religious revival that included snake handling). Published in segments in the Atlantic Monthly in 1928 and 1929 and then reorganized into book form, the travelogue is a colorful record of the culture, customs, and dialect of the southern mountaineers of that era.
Recounts in detail the volatile political period in Alabama following the end of the Civil War
Following the end of the Civil War, white Southerners were forced to concede equal rights to those who had been enslaved, ushering in a new and ruthless brand of politics. Suddenly, the status and place of some four million former slaves dominated the national and regional political dialogue. In Alabama, the Republican Party established itself quickly and powerfully with the participation of a newly freed constituency, firmly aligned against the Democratic Party that had long dictated the governance of the state. Well-heeled planters, merchants, and bankers, joined by yeoman farmers, staged a counterrevolution by gravitating strongly to the Democratic Party and its unabashedly white supremacist measures. The ensuing power struggle in the birthplace of the Confederacy is at the heart of Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.
What emerges in William Warren Rogers Jr.’s comprehensive study of the era is a detailed examination of Reconstruction politics, particularly in Alabama. This book explores an explosive and unpredictable political environment that a few years earlier would have been inconceivable. A vivid picture emerges of courthouse rallies and bitter infighting in legislative circles. Rogers’s narrative ventures into darker places as well: to the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt regions of Alabama, where Klan nightriders used violence against an enemy and ideology they could not abide.
The attempt to capture and account for the unforgiving political landscape created by the extraordinary circumstances of Reconstruction constitutes this study’s most central contribution. Rogers often quotes black and white citizens, Democrats and Republicans. Drawn from newspapers, correspondence, and various federal investigations, these firsthand voices are passionate, unvarnished, and filled with conviction. They offer a startling immediacy and illustrate the temper—or distemper—of the times. Readers are treated to a panoramic unveiling of Reconstruction Alabama politics that provides a sense of what was truly at stake: the values by which a region and the nation as a whole would chart its future for the century to come.
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Four streams make up the Alabama River system, the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. Together they flow for more than 900 miles, through some of the most historic regions of the state. This book looks at the way these streams have shaped the lives of the people who lived along them, and how, in turn, people have used the rivers to their own ends.
This is the story of the people of the Alabama River system: the Indians, traders, steamboatmen, passengers, slaves, loggers, "deadheaders", divers, river rats, fishermen, industrial giants, factory workers, business boosters, environmentalists, and those who simply love the rivers because of something that seems to have been a part of them from the first time they saw the water flowing. This is a book for and about these people. They, and the rivers, are the main characters in the story.
Beginning in the spring of 1969, Huckleberry Finn inspired a question: Could you build a raft, float down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and on the way learn something about America and its peoples? Will Bagley, a vagrant longhair and future prize-winning western historian, and his friends could, and did. Now, a half century after the adventure, Bagley tells his story.
Contributors. Thomas Jessen Adams, Vincanne Adams, Vern Baxter, Maria Celeste Casati Allegretti, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Rien Fertel, Megan French-Marcelin, Cedric G. Johnson, Alecia P. Long, Vicki Mayer, Toby Miller, Sue Mobley, Marguerite Nguyen, Aaron Nyerges, Adolph Reed Jr., Helen A. Regis, Matt Sakakeeny, Heidi Schmalbach, Felipe Smith, Bryan Wagner
San Antonio native, military veteran, merchant, and mayor pro tem José Antonio Menchaca (1800–1879) was one of only a few Tejano leaders to leave behind an extensive manuscript of recollections. Portions of the document were published in 1907, followed by a “corrected” edition in 1937, but the complete work could not be published without painstaking reconstruction. At last available in its entirety, Menchaca’s book of reminiscences captures the social life, people, and events that shaped the history of Texas’s tumultuous transformation during his lifetime. Highlighting not only Menchaca’s acclaimed military service but also his vigorous defense of Tejanos’ rights, dignity, and heritage, Recollections of a Tejano Life charts a remarkable legacy while incorporating scholarly commentary to separate fact from fiction.
Revealing how Tejanos perceived themselves and the revolutionary events that defined them, this wonderfully edited volume presents Menchaca’s remembrances of such diverse figures as Antonio López de Santa Anna, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, General Adrián Woll, Comanche chief “Casamiro,” and Texas Ranger Jack Hays. Menchaca and his fellow Tejanos were actively engaged in local struggles as Mexico won her independence from Spain; later many joined the fight to establish the Republic of Texas, only to see it annexed to the United States nine years after the Battle of San Jacinto. This first-person account corrects important misconceptions and brings previously unspoken truths vividly to life.
"Remember the Alamo!" reverberates through Texas history and culture, but what exactly are we remembering? Over nearly two centuries, the Mexican victory over an outnumbered band of Alamo defenders has been transformed into an American victory for the love of liberty. Why did the historical battle of 1836 undergo this metamorphosis in memory and mythology to become such a potent master symbol in Texan and American culture?
In this probing book, Richard Flores seeks to answer that question by examining how the Alamo's transformation into an American cultural icon helped to shape social, economic, and political relations between Anglo and Mexican Texans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In the first part of the book, he looks at how the attempts of heritage society members and political leaders to define the Alamo as a place have reflected struggles within Texas society over the place and status of Anglos and Mexicans. In the second part, he explores how Alamo movies and the transformation of Davy Crockett into an Alamo hero/martyr have advanced deeply racialized, ambiguous, and even invented understandings of the past.
“[These reminiscences] light up for whoever will read the earliest days of early English-speaking Texas.” —J. Frank Dobie, from the foreword
A firsthand account of pioneer life in east Texas.
The Republic of Texas was still in its first exultation over independence when John Salmon "Rip" Ford arrived from South Carolina in June of 1836. Ford stayed to participate in virtually every major event in Texas history during the next sixty years. Doctor, lawyer, surveyor, newspaper reporter, elected representative, and above all, soldier and Indian fighter, Ford sat down in his old age to record the events of the turbulent years through which he had lived. Stephen Oates has edited Ford's memoirs to produce a clear and vigorous personal history of Texas.
A reprint of the 1910 study, Reconstruction in Texas examines the events that still impact upon Texas and the South.
Born on a farm near Anahuac, Texas, in 1875 and possessed of only a fourth-grade education, Ross Sterling was one of the most successful Texans of his generation. Driven by a relentless work ethic, he become a wealthy oilman, banker, newspaper publisher, and, from 1931 to 1933, one-term governor of Texas. Sterling was the principal founder of the Humble Oil and Refining Company, which eventually became the largest division of the ExxonMobil Corporation, as well as the owner of the Houston Post.
Eager to "preserve a narrative record of his life and deeds," Ross Sterling hired Ed Kilman, an old friend and editorial page editor of the Houston Post, to write his biography. Though the book was nearly finished before Sterling's death in 1949, it never found a publisher due to Kilman's florid writing style and overly hagiographic portrayal of Sterling.
In this volume, by contrast, editor Don Carleton uses the original oral history dictated by Ross Sterling to Ed Kilman to present the former governor's life story in his own words. Sterling vividly describes his formative years, early business ventures, and active role in developing the Texas oil industry. He also recalls his political career, from his appointment to the Texas Highway Commission to his term as governor, ending with his controversial defeat for reelection by "Ma" Ferguson. Sterling's reminiscences constitute an important primary source not only on the life of a Texan who deserves to be more widely remembered, but also on the history of Houston and the growth of the American oil industry.
How Rick Perry navigated and shaped Texas politics as the state’s longest serving governor.
Rick Perry, the charming rancher, pilot, and politician from West Texas who was governor from 2000 to 2015, is one of the most important but polarizing figures in the state's history. Over the nearly forty years he spent in the political arena, his political instincts served as a radar primed to sense future political opportunities. Hugging the arc of Texas political change, he shifted from a rural, “blue dog” Democrat to one of the most conservative politicians the state had elected up to that time, overseeing the enactment of controversial redistricting, voting, and abortion measures. Yet his evolution was complicated and incomplete, as his stands on such topics as immigration, vaccine requirements, and the use of state funds to attract business ran into opposition from a growing and ever-more conservative wing of the Republican Party in Texas—and the nation.
Rick Perry is both a biography of Perry as a politician and a study of the shifts in state politics that took place during his time in office. Demonstrating that Perry ranks among the most consequential governors in Texas history, Brandon Rottinghaus chronicles the profound ways he accumulated power and shaped the governorship.
Winner, William P. Clements Prize, Best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America, 2004
Not quite the United States and not quite Mexico, La Junta de los Rios straddles the border between Texas and Chihuahua, occupying the basin formed by the conjunction of the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the Chihuahuan Desert, ranking in age and dignity with the Anasazi pueblos of New Mexico.
In the first comprehensive history of the region, Jefferson Morgenthaler traces the history of La Junta de los Rios from the formation of the Mexico-Texas border in the mid-19th century to the 1997 ambush shooting of teenage goatherd Esquiel Hernandez by U.S. Marines performing drug interdiction in El Polvo, Texas. "Though it is scores of miles from a major highway, I found natives, soldiers, rebels, bandidos, heroes, scoundrels, drug lords, scalp hunters, medal winners, and mystics," writes Morgenthaler. "I found love, tragedy, struggle, and stories that have never been told." In telling the turbulent history of this remote valley oasis, he examines the consequences of a national border running through a community older than the invisible line that divides it.
Between 1910 and 1920, thousands of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals were killed along the Texas border. The killers included strangers and neighbors, vigilantes and law enforcement officers—in particular, Texas Rangers. Despite a 1919 investigation of the state-sanctioned violence, no one in authority was ever held responsible.
Reverberations of Racial Violence gathers fourteen essays on this dark chapter in American history. Contributors explore the impact of civil rights advocates, such as José Tomás Canales, the sole Mexican-American representative in the Texas State Legislature between 1905 and 1921. The investigation he spearheaded emerges as a historical touchstone, one in which witnesses testified in detail to the extrajudicial killings carried out by state agents. Other chapters situate anti-Mexican racism in the context of the era's rampant and more fully documented violence against African Americans. Contributors also address the roles of women in responding to the violence, as well as the many ways in which the killings have continued to weigh on communities of color in Texas. Taken together, the essays provide an opportunity to move beyond the more standard Black-white paradigm in reflecting on the broad history of American nation-making, the nation’s rampant racial violence, and civil rights activism.
Arkansas, the Old South’s last frontier, was forced, after the election of Lincoln, to face the issue of secession. A decade earlier, the state had spurned all efforts from within to withdraw from the Union, but the following ten years drew Arkansas deeper into the economic and cultural community that bound it to the other slaveholding states. Now rumblings of secession were heard even before the president-elect assumed office on March 4, 1861. The question was asked on street corners, in offices, barbershops and living rooms: Would Arkansas leave the Union?
Answers to that question caused a fundamental realignment of politics in Arkansas during the winter of 1860–61. The former political coalition of Democrat and Whig fell away in a geographical split between the uplands and the lowlands. In this important and exciting book, the first to tell the story of Arkansas’s road to secession, James Woods examines the differences between uplanders, whose mountain regions offered little useful farmland for any crop, and lowlanders, whose vast deltas were ideally suited for cotton farming. The southern portion of the state began to rely increasingly upon slavery as it became linked to the economy of cotton and Southern antebellum values, but the northern region of the state did not. Woods focuses upon the resulting social, economic, and geographic divisions that grew within Arkansas before and during the secession crisis. He captures the political struggles of the state as it tore away from the nation, and as it threatened, in so doing, to tear itself apart.
Rediscovering Fort Sanders is a unique book that combines a narrative history of pre-Civil War Knoxville, the war years and continuing construction of Fort Sanders, the failed attempts to preserve the postwar fort, and the events which led to its almost total destruction. Research by Terry and Charles Faulkner resulted in two major discoveries: the fort was actually located a block farther to the west then previously recognized, and there are still identifiable remnants of the fortification where none were believed to exist.
More than just a chronicle of a significant chapter in Civil War and postwar history, this book will inspire others to continue the effort to ensure that the site and remains of Fort Sanders are preserved and properly commemorated for future generations.
Charles H. Faulkner began archaeological investigations at the Ramsey House in 1985 and concluded his work with his retirement from the University of Tennessee's anthropology department in 2005. During his tenure with the Ramsey House Archaeological Project, Faulkner and his team of scholars and students unearthed the prehistory of Native American occupation at Swan Pond, several outbuilding and early home foundation features yielding evidence of extensive early renovations to the Ramsey House and surrounding Swan Pond, and a multitude of ceramics and other artifacts left behind by the Ramsey family and other tenants ranging in dates from the late 1700s to the 1950s. Faulkner's research presented in The Ramseys at Swan Pond reveals not only the material culture and family lifeways of early wealth in East Tennessee, but chronicles the occupation of a homestead that would become pivotal to the development of early Knoxville and Knox County and offers insights into the responsibilities Ramsey and his family undertook in order to tame an early American frontier.
Faulkner provides the reader a complete overview of the excavations, and emphasizes the importance of historic research within the discipline of archaeology in his introduction. The Ramseys at Swan Pond will be of interest to anyone studying historic archeology, the early American frontier, and Tennessee history.
Charles H. Faulkner is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee. He is the author/editor of The Prehistoric Native American Art of Mud Glyph Cave, The Old Stone Fort: Exploring an Archaeological Mystery, Rock Art of the Eastern Woodlands, and numerous other essays.
of black Cincinnati. These studies offer insight into both the dynamics of racism and a
community's changing responses to it." -- Peter Rachleff, author of Black Labor in
Richmond
William Butler Ogden was a pioneer railroad magnate, one of the earliest founders and developers of the city of Chicago, and an important influence on U.S. westward expansion. His career as a businessman stretched from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the Wisconsin lumber forests, from the iron mines of Pennsylvania to the financial capitals in New York and beyond. Jack Harpster’s The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden is the first chronicle of one of the most notable figures in nineteenth-century America.
Harpster traces the life of Ogden from his early experiences as a boy and young businessman in upstate New York to his migration to Chicago, where he invested in land, canal construction, and steamboat companies. He became Chicago’s first mayor, built the city’s first railway system, and suffered through the Great Chicago Fire. His diverse business interests included real estate, land development, city planning, urban transportation, manufacturing, beer brewing, mining, and banking, to name a few. Harpster, however, does not simply focus on Ogden’s role as business mogul; he delves into the heart and soul of the man himself.
The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago is a meticulously researched and nuanced biography set against the backdrop of the historical and societal themes of the nineteenth century. It is a sweeping story about one man’s impact on the birth of commerce in America. Ogden’s private life proves to be as varied and interesting as his public persona, and Harpster weaves the two into a colorful tapestry of a life well and usefully lived.
Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed have brought together essays that explore the intersections in the backgrounds, education, professional affiliations, and public lives and achievements of black writers, journalists, visual artists, dance instructors, and other creators working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organized chronologically, the chapters unearth transformative forces that supported the emergence of individuals and social networks dedicated to work in arts and letters. The result is an illuminating scholarly collaboration that remaps African American intellectual and cultural geography and reframes the concept of urban black renaissance.
Contributors: Richard A. Courage, Mary Jo Deegan, Brenda Ellis Fredericks, James C. Hall, Bonnie Claudia Harrison, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Amy M. Mooney, Christopher Robert Reed, Clovis E. Semmes, Margaret Rose Vendryes, and Richard Yarborough
. . a well-researched and thoughtful inquiry into the circumstances and
social forces producing one of the most violent of twentieth-century American
race riots."
-- American Historical Review
"His work fills a serious
gap in the history of racial violence in the United States. Never before
analyzed by sociologists in the way that the Chicago and Detroit riots
were, the East St. Louis riot outranked both as measured by the number
of deaths."
-- American Journal of Sociology
Fifty years ago, educator and writer Robert E. Gard traveled across Wisconsin, learning the trivial, controversial, and landmark stories behind how cities, counties, and local places got their names. This volume records the fruits of Gard’s labors in an alphabetical listing of places from every corner of Wisconsin, and the stories behind their often-unusual names. Gard’s work provides an important snapshot of how Wisconsin residents of a bygone era came to understand the names of their towns and home places, many of which can no
longer be found on any map.
Celebrated rural historian Jerry Apps introduces this reprint of Gard’s work,
saying that in “some ways The Romance of Wisconsin Place Names is a reference book, a place where you can go to learn a little more about your home town. But in many ways it is much more than that, for it includes the stories of places throughout the state, submitted by the people who knew them. It is a book where story, people, and place all come together.”
Raised on a small dairy farm in the Driftless Area in the mid-twentieth century, Gary Jones gets real about his rural roots. In this collection of interrelated stories, Jones writes with plainspoken warmth and irreverence about farm, family, and folks on the ridge. Readers will meet Gramp Jones, whose oversized overalls saved him from losing a chunk of flesh to an irate sow; the young one-room-school teacher who helped the kids make sled jumps at recess; Charlotte, the lawn-mowing sheep who once ended up in the living room; Victor the pig-cutter, who learned his trade from folk tradition rather than vet school; and other colorful characters of the ridge. Often humorous and occasionally touching, Jones’s essays paint a vivid picture that will entertain city and country folk alike.
He discusses novelists from Jack London to John Steinbeck and on to Joan Didion. He covers historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Earl Pomeroy and Patricia Nelson Limerick, and artists from Frederic Remington and Charles Russell to Georgia O’Keeffe and R. C. Gorman. The author places emphasis on women painters and authors such as Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Judith Baca. He also stresses important works of ethnic writers including Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Amy Tan. An intriguing survey of tendencies and trends and a well-defined profile of influences and outgrowths, this book will be valuable to students and scholars of western culture and history, American studies, and related disciplines. General readers will appreciate the book’s balanced structure and spirited writing style. All readers, whatever their level of interest, will discover the major cultural inventions of the American West over the past one hundred years.
The signs of illness and trauma can seem omnipresent in today’s West: land and soil disrupted from mining, overgrazing, logging, and farming; wildlife habitat reduced and fragmented; native societies disturbed and threatened; open space diminished by cities and suburbs; wilderness destroyed by roads and recreation-seekers. But as these essays suggest, the “treatment program” for healing the West has many healthful side effects. Engaging in the kinds of projects suggested by contributors is therapeutic not only for the environment but for participants as well. Restoration, repair, and recovery can counter symptoms of despair with concentrated doses of promise and possibility.
The more “lesions” the West has, this book suggests, the more opportunities there are for westerners to revive and ultimately cure the ailing patient they have helped to create. The very idea of restoring the West to health, contributors and editors contend, unleashes our imaginations, sharpens our minds, and gives meaning to the ways we choose to live our lives. At the same time, acknowledging the profound difficulties of the work that lies ahead immunizes us against our own arrogance as we set about the task of healing the West.
Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.
Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.
Although today he is virtually unknown, during his lifetime Cummings was one of the most famous newspapermen in the United States, in part because of stories like these. Complete with a biographical sketch and historical introduction, A Remarkable Curiosity is an enjoyable read for anybody interested in the American West in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
But the Old West (like all visions of the past) proved to be shifting cultural terrain. In both Germany and the U. S., Western narratives of white settlement were once seen as “apolitical” and were widely accepted by white people. But during the Nazi period in Germany and in East Germany after 1945, the American West was reevaluated and politically repurposed. Then, during the late twentieth century, understandings of the West changed in the U. S. as well, while the violence of white settler colonialism and the displacement of Indigenous peoples became a flashpoint in the culture wars between right and left. Reagin shows that the past that fans seek to recreate is shaped by the changing present, as each new generation adapts and relives their own West.
The early plans for Mount Rushmore called for blasting heroic likenesses of mountain men--Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter-—into the solid mountain granite of South Dakota. Readers of this colorful volume will see the heroics and the brutally rugged individualism that made these fur trappers candidates for legend and infamy.
The accounts of the mountain men are spun from the experiences of a nation moving westward: a trapper returns from the dead; hunters feast on buffalo intestines served on a dirty blanket; a missionary woman is astounded by the violence and vulgarity of the trappers’ rendezvous. These are just a few of the narratives, tall tales, and just plain lies that make up A Rendezvous Reader.
The writers represented in this book include a dyed-in-the wool trappers, adventuring European nobles, upward-gazing eastern missionaries, and just plain hacks who never unsheathed a Green River knife or traveled farther west that the Ohio River. What these writers have in common is that all of them, whether they dealt mostly in fact of entirely in fantasy, helped to create a uniquely American icon: the mountain man.
Though A Rendezvous Reader will certainly be of interest to the historian and the historically curious, the true purpose of this anthology is to bring together in one volume the liveliest most readable accounts by and about the mountain men. Whether you sample or devour this anthology of mountain horrors and delights, it is a book guaranteed to entertain as well as inform.
This book moves beyond familiar stereotypes to achieve a more nuanced understanding of race while also showing how ethnicity formed in conjunction with religious and regional identity. The chapters demonstrate how religion shaped cultural encounters, contributed to the construction of racial identities, and served as a motivating factor in the lives of historical actors. The opening chapters document how religion fostered community in Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century. The second section examines how physical encounters—such as those involving Chinese immigrants, Hermanos Penitentes, and Pueblo dancers—shaped religious and racial encounters in the West. The final essays investigate racial and religious identity among the Latter-day Saints and southern California Muslims. As these contributions clearly show, race, religion, and region are as critical as gender, sexuality, and class in understanding the melting pot that is the West. By depicting the West as a unique site for understanding race and religion, they open a new window on how we view all of America.
In Reflecting a Prairie Town Drake Hokanson takes a prolonged look at a common place in an uncommon fashion. He presents Peterson, Iowa, through a singular combination of words and images, a remarkable synthesis of history, geography, direct observation, climatology, botany, oral history, archaeology, agricultural science, literature, geology, photography, and even a bit of astronomy. This vernacular landscape study is lavishly illustrated with photographs taken by the author, including stunning panoramic views.
The fundamental truth of experience on this continent has always lain in the challenges and opportunities of space. Place mattered because we were so few before the immensity of the land. But place at the same time rooted us in that immensity. Even now our appreciation for place is not quite dead; locked in our urban environments we continue to crave a “view,” be it of mountains, forests, or prairies. These “views” crop up unexpectedly as photographic murals in office buildings or posters in dentists' offices. It is to this stifled sense of the importance of place that Hokanson speaks; he invites us to remember and to be revitalized.
The magic of Reflecting a Prairie Town is the revelation that Peterson, Iowa, is a small town that is also uncannily large. In capturing the essence of this one place Hokanson helps us to understand our own worlds better—he asks the simple questions many of us would like to ask were we given the opportunity. To enter this book is to come back to a place we have never really seen before.
McNall rejects the traditional view that blames the failure of the Alliance on a turn to mass-based electoral politics, but rather sees the move into national politics by the Farmer's Alliance as part of a rational strategy to better wage their fight for economic justice. The Kansas populists failed, he argues, because of their inability to embrace a broad, working-class base, to provide an effective alternative vision, and ultimately to create a distinct class organization. Debates about how classes come into being, or how democracy is to be realized, cannot be settled in the abstract. McNall's recreation of this heroic struggle is a model in the analysis of class formation. At the same time, The Road to Rebellion is dynamic social history, which holds vital lessons for structuring and realizing alternative political agendas today.
This is the colorful saga of how the Old West became the New West. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding after the turn of the twenty-first, Rocky Mountain Heartland explains how Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming evolved over the course of the century. Smith is mindful of all the factors that propelled the region: mining, agriculture, water, immigration, tourism, technology, and two world wars. And he points out how the three states responded in varying ways to each of these forces.
Although this is a regional story, Smith never loses sight of the national events that influenced events in the region. As Smith skillfully shows, the vast natural resources of the three states attracted optimistic, hopeful Americans intent on getting rich, enjoying the outdoors, or creating new lives for themselves and their families. How they resolved these often-conflicting goals is the modern story of the Rocky Mountain region.
When DJ Lee’s dear friend vanishes in the vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana, she travels there to seek answers. The journey unexpectedly brings to an end her fifteen-year quest to uncover the buried history of her family in this remote place. Although Lee doesn’t find all the answers, she comes away with a penetrating memoir that weaves her present-day story with past excursions into the region, wilderness history, and family secrets.
As she grapples with wild animal stand-offs, bush plane flights in dense fog, raging forest fires, and strange characters who have come to the wilderness to seek or hide, Lee learns how she can survive emotionally and how the wilderness survives as an ecosystem. Her growing knowledge of the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, and Nimíipuu land practices helps her find intimacy in this remote landscape.
Skillfully intertwining history, outdoor adventure, and mystery, Lee’s memoir is an engaging contribution to the growing body of literature on women and wilderness and a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between people and the natural world.
A vivid description of Colorado’s beginnings
This is the first single-volume history of the Colorado territory, encompassing the entire territorial period from the beginning of the Civil War to 1876, when Colorado became a state. The Rise of the Centennial State traces the growth of the territory as new technologies increased mining profits and as new modes of transportation--especially the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific railroads--opened the territory to eastern markets, bringing waves of settlers to farm, ranch, and establish new communities.
Eugene H. Berwanger's history is packed with colorful characters and portraits of sprawling, brawling frontier and mining towns from Denver to Central City. He presents a multifaceted discussion of Colorado's resurgence after the war, with rich discussions of the role of minorities in the territory’s development: Indian-white relations (including discussions of now forgotten battles of Beecher’s Island and Summit Springs, which destroyed the Indians’ hold on the Colorado Plains); the social segregation of blacks in Denver; and Mexican Americans’ displeasure at being separated from the Hispano culture of New Mexico. Berwanger also demonstrates the decisive role of Colorado’s admission to statehood in swinging the disputed presidential election of 1876 to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes.
Representative both in subject and approach, the selections reach back to Arapaho and pioneer times before the park was established and move forward to span its entire first century. The voices that speak to us are distinctive: among them are Irish sportsman Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, the Fourth Earl of Dunraven; British travel writer Isabella Bird; mountaineer Frederick Chapin; naturalist Enos Mills; iconic ranger Jack Moomaw and his fictional counterpart, Dorr Yeager’s Bob Flame; and contemporary nature writers Anne Zwinger and SueEllen Campbell—to mention but a few. Some tell us about the past, recalling moments of personal triumph and tragedy. Other voices are quieter; some are more polemic. All capture and share a part of the national treasure that is Rocky Mountain National Park.
The first of its kind, this original collection is a rich literary and historical compendium of the best that has been written about Rocky Mountain National Park. As such it provides an indispensable introduction to the nation’s twelfth national park.
Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley
Rediscovering Northwest Denver is a chatty, enjoyable read that tells of the tycoons and entrepreneurs whose fine Victorian homes still dot the area, and of the immigrants from various European cultures who clung together for comfort in the face of prejudice. It includes maps, photographs, past and present street names, a bibliography, index, and suggested tours. Northwest Denver today is typified by traditions, beauty, and pride, all of which the author captures in this ever-popular book.
Winner of the 1993 Hubert Humphrey Award for the book's contribution to the historical appreciation and preservation of Northwest Denver.
Poston led his party through Sonora and the territory of the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, which today encompasses southern Arizona and a portion of southern New Mexico. The syndicate’s charge to the young adventurer was to acquire land in Mexico in anticipation of the Gadsden Purchase and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Reconnaissance in Sonora details Poston’s expedition, including the founding of the town of Colorado City at the site of present-day Yuma, Arizona.
C. Gilbert Storms explores the American ideas of territorial expansion and Manifest Destiny, the national debate over a route for a transcontinental railroad, the legends of rich gold and silver mines in northern Mexico, and the French and American filibusters that plagued northern Mexico in the early 1850s.
“At its best, Red Line can read like an original synthesis of Peter Matthiessen and William Burroughs . . . a brave and interesting book.”
—David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Charles Bowden’s Red Line is a look at America through the window of the southwest. His vision is as nasty, peculiar, brutal, as it is intriguing and, perhaps, accurate. Bowden offers consciousness rather than consolation, but in order to do anything about our nightmares we must take a cold look and Red Line casts the coldest eye in recent memory.”
—Jim Harrison
One of Charles Bowden’s earliest books, Red Line powerfully conveys a desert civilization careening over the edge—and decaying at its center. Bowden’s quest for the literal and figurative truth behind the assassination of a murderous border-town drug dealer becomes a meditation on the glories of the desert landscape, the squalors of the society that threatens it, and the contradictions inherent in trying to save it.
Equipped with camera, pen, and a lively curiosity, photographer Maeve Hickey and writer Lawrence J. Taylor set out to capture whatever might come their way on the road to Mexico. They roamed and rambled, they stayed well off the beaten track, and they talked to nearly everyone they met, from wisecracking waitresses to landed gentry to street urchins dressed in rags. Their book brings to life the calf ropers and casinos, the saints and sinners, the mariachis and miracles in a no-man's-land that sometimes seems to belong neither to the United States nor to Mexico.
Following the footsteps of earlier travelers-traders, warriors, missionaries, and explorers-these modern pilgrims take a hands-on approach to their journey. Throughout, both writer and photographer convey the sizzle and spice of a land where Indian, Mexican, and Anglo worlds have collided, coexisted, and melted into each other for centuries. Their eye for the hidden telling detail carries the reader straight into the action, and their zest for excitement spurs any traveler to drop everything, grab a bag, and hit the road to Mexico.
The 1859 exploration of the Great Basin by army topographical engineer James Simpson opened up one of the West's most important transportation and communication corridors, a vital link between the Pacific Coast and the rest of the nation. It became the route of the Pony Express and the Overland Mail and Stage, the line of the Pacific telegraph, a major wagon road for freighters and emigrants, and, later, the first transcontinental auto road, the Lincoln Highway, now Highway 50.
No one has accurately tracked or mapped Simpson's original route, until now. Jesse Petersen shows in words, maps, and photos exactly where the explorer went. Sharing his detective-like reasoning as he walked or drove the entire trail west and Simpson's variant route returning east, Petersen takes readers on a mountain and desert trek through some of America's most remote and striking landscapes.
"This is truly an epic work, an absolute standard for any Southwestern collection."—Book Talk
Select maps from the 1984 edition of Rim of Christendom are now available online through the UA Campus Repository.
Rim to River is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.
In Rim to River, Zoellner does for Arizona what Larry McMurtry did for Texas in In a Narrow Grave and what Wallace Stegner did for Utah in Mormon Country: paint an enduring portrait of a misunderstood American state. An indictment, a love letter, and a homecoming story all at once.
The Santa Catalina Mountains first captivated Tony Zimmerman on a 1937 hunting trip. Regard for the alpine beauty must have been in his genes—he was the son of Swiss German immigrants—and by 1940 the Tucson schoolteacher had begun taking his family to Mount Lemmon to spend the summer. Back then, the road up the mountain was a rough two-track dirt road from Oracle, and Summerhaven was nothing but a sleepy cluster of summer cabins. But Tony Zimmerman was to help change all of that.
The Road to Mount Lemmon is a beguiling memoir of the Catalina Mountains told by the daughter of one of the pioneers in the life and development of Mount Lemmon’s communities. Mary Ellen Barnes tells how her father Tony resigned from teaching in 1943 to devote his career to the development of this mountain oasis. He not only sold real estate for long time landowner Randolph Jenks, he even bought the village’s tiny two-room store, installing a sawmill to build a larger store, and built the Mount Lemmon Inn. And as she spins Tony’s personal saga, she also gives readers a glimpse of the Catalinas before Tucson became a boom town, recalling idyllic adventures in wild country and the cowboys, rangers, ranchers, and loggers who worked there.
Barnes tells Tony’s story as if sharing it with family, evoking her father’s personality on every page. The Road to Mount Lemmon is an intimate view of a mountain community over the course of nearly sixty years—a view that few people have shared but one all can appreciate.
On the morning of August 14, 1909, a small, diverse group including Professor Byron Cummings of the University of Utah, Government Land Office surveyor William Douglass, pioneer archaeologist and trader John Weatherill, and Paiute guide Nasja Begay gazed at the largest structure of its kind in the world-Rainbow Bridge. Their presence marked the official discovery of the magnificent natural bridge, which spans 275 feet and towers 291 feet above the stream bed below it. Of the discovery party, only Nasja Begay had seen the stone arch before; he was one of a probably small number of Paiutes and Navajos, the true modern discoverers, who had visited it. In 1910, an executive order issued under the still fresh Antiquities Act created Rainbow Bridge National Monument, one of the first.
This was only the beginning of the Rainbow Bridge historical record. Its fame was soon widespread, but for many years its visitors would be few, their numbers restricted by the long arduous trail around Navajo Mountain to the site. Those few and the tour guides and businesses that emerged to serve them, especially at Rainbow Lodge, were an interesting mix though. The bridge's story included such western figures as trader Louisa Weatherill, wife of John and a Navajo speaker who was the first Anglo to hear of the bridge; Barry Goldwater, who for a time owned and operated Rainbow Lodge; Zane Grey, who wrote about the bridge; and David Brower, the Sierra Club leader who got wrapped up in the intersection of the Rainbow Bridge story with that of Glen Canyon Dam. Its construction and the filling of Lake Powell behind it made Rainbow Bridge a battleground, key territory in the larger war over water and conservation in the West. The remote, hard to reach national monument was supposed to define a limit to Colorado River reclamation but instead was inundated by Lake Powell and the tide of visitors who then could reach the foot of the bridge by boat. Though Rainbow is now easily and frequently visited and National Park Service amenities are in place, access to Rainbow Bridge is still an evolving and controversial issue.
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